Stephen Prina: Brenners Artist in Residence 2008
07-25-2008
Stephen Prina, born 1954 in Galesburg/Illinois, is this year's "Brenners Artist in Residence".
Prina used his time from July 7 to 27, 2008 at Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa in order to prepare for his extensive exhibition with accompanying publication at the Public Art Gallery in Baden-Baden.
The work scholarship was awarded for the fourth time based on a proposal put forward by Baden-Baden's Public Art Gallery. The scholarship's aim is to regroup Baden-Baden's considerable, partly sophisticated concealed cultural reserves and reinterpret them. Through this project promoted by Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa new and discerning dimensions for internationally significant artists encountering the town, its history and culture, first and foremost though the people and the landscape in and around Baden-Baden, are opened up.
The exhibition The Second Sentence of Everything I Read IS You from July 19 - Oct. 5, 2008, is the first major institutional individual exhibition by Stephen Prina in Germany. It presents numerous works, which were never previously shown in Europe. Following up the success that Prina has celebrated in the USA - including works by the artist being shown at this year's Whitney Biennale in New York - the exhibition at Baden-Baden's Public Art Gallery is intended to make his work known to a wider public in Europe and in this way intensify the artist's international reception. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, which will present a major spectrum of his works.
Since the beginning of his career Stephen Prina's artistic practice has contained many facettes: he worked in various media at the same time, presented individual exhibitions, collaborated with other artists, produced films and recordings and appeared in performances and readings. His work - which includes painting, photography, film, object and space installations - deliberately tackles means of Minimal Art and Conceptual Art in order to question their paradigms in a critical and ironic manner. In this way influential aspects of artistic and social developments of past years are reflected and brought up to date in the present. Each of his projects marks a complex reference system, which contains motives and themes from the visual arts, music, literature, film and philosophy. Constantly his works relate to a range of significant theoreticians, writers and artists such as Theodor W. Adorno, Heinrich Böll, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol or Lawrence Weiner. Prina links these references in new interrelationships and reconstructs or varies their fundamental structures. In the process he consciously eliminates the borders between high and low, between high and mass culture.
In addition to motivative and structural references Prina's works particularly emphasise the placing of art in exhibition halls. His projects thematise the genetic context and provide a special relationship between historic and current exhibition venues. They accent the temporariness of art through the open, constantly developing work structure. Prina frequently is engaged in long-term projects on works, which reflect the given exhibition context. Such an artistic strategy is followed by the Sound Installation - The Second Sentence of Everything I Read Is You, which was shown for the first time in the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York in 2006. In summer 2007 a further version was created in the Gisela Capitain Gallery in Cologne with the dimensions and the colour nuances changing. The yellow room devised for Baden-Baden forms the latest extension of this project, which can be associated with a temporarily set up "travelling stage spectacle".
